Author: thetoothfairy

This week I saw Amy Gray and Annabelle Leve speak about a subject they are designing on Global Child Health. During their presentation, they spoke about using the ABC Learning Design Framework, based on Professor Diana Laurillard’s Conversational Framework (Laurillard, 2009). This was not the first time I had come across the Conversational Framework, and I must confess that the figure representing the framework scares me just a little (below).

However, one of the things I have learnt over the past few years in exploring more about learning and education theory is that to overcome the feeling of being a ‘visitor’ in this literature, I need to recognise this feeling and take the time to explore these theories and frameworks to the point that they become familiar. To borrow from David White and Alison Le Cornu’s typology of ‘Visitors and Residents’ for describing the use of technology, I want to feel like a ‘resident’ in this field of learning and teaching theory (White & Le Cornu, 2011).

So these last few days, that is what I have tried to do with Laurillard’s Conversational Framework. In addition to reading, one of the most helpful resources I found was this video of Diana Laurillard herself describing the framework and (reassuringly) acknowledging its necessary complicatedness.

The framework is based theories of how students learn, and represents the actions of both teachers and students in the learning process. It can provide those designing learning activities with a guide to the types of learning students will be engaging in and is particularly relevant to helping appropriately employ technology in this process.

Now to jump to dental education…

Teaching academics at Dental Schools generally hold their role due to their expertise, experience and research contribution to a field such as periodontics, dental materials, epidemiology, oral medicine, health promotion…

However, to teach, this content expertise or knowledge is only part of what is required. Pedagogical and technological knowledge are also required. I have found the TPACK framework useful for conceptualizing this, as it distinguishes between the triad of content knowledge, pedagogical knowledge and technological knowledge (Mishra & Koehler 2006) necessary, particularly when teaching online. Teaching online requires due diligence being paid to the interface between sound pedagogical knowledge and technological knowledge and in neglecting this, potentially fails to best serve our students and profession.

Those of us tasked with the responsibility of reviewing the MDS curricula, and reforming the assessment and feedback strategy at the School, are aware that the success of what we are doing will depend upon working with colleagues to collectively develop the technological and pedagogical knowledge as we embrace a blended learning approach to dental education, and exploit the online learning environment for the benefit of our students. I have written a little bit about this in a previous post.

Last night, while reading about the Conversational Framework, serendipitously, a colleague posted the following tweet:

Even with captions students are listening to the lectures more than twice… 1. These aren’t my lectures… 2. This was a great conversion for covid and emergency teaching 3. Now we need to teach the teachers how to teach online. https://t.co/2TcgfUrtsH

— Clare McNally (@Doc_Mac19) May 20, 2021

It was her point of “Now we need to teach the teachers how to teach online” that brought these two frameworks together for me, and the previously hazy pieces of the puzzle started to become clearer, and fall into place. One of our main challenges, particularly in employing online learning in theoretical dental education is to move away from students engaging in ‘acquisition’ and have them spending more time on other types of learning; inquiry, discussion, practice, collaboration and production while online.

I think we can employ the Conversational Framework to help support the development of pedagogical and technological knowledge in our School as we work to design the learning activities as part of implementation of our new curricula.

To do this, we could use ABC Learning Design framework and learning designer toolkit which are based on the Conversational Framework. This provides a practical framework which will help staff to focus on the actions of the student when designing learning activities. This could support staff to take a student-centered approach to designing learning, and move away from the more traditional passive didactic approach which has been the basis of theoretical dental education for many decades.

The idea is in its early stages, but I think I can feel it coming together…

References:

Laurillard, D. (2009). The pedagogical challenges to collaborative technologies. International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, 4(1), 5-20. doi:10.1007/s11412-008-9056-2

Mishra, P., & Koehler, M. J. (2006). Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge: A Framework for Teacher Knowledge(6), 1017. Retrieved from https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=sso&db=edsbl&AN=RN188285593&site=eds-live&scope=site&custid=s2775460

Roddy, C., Amiet, D. L., Chung, J., Holt, C., Shaw, L., McKenzie, S., . . . Mundy, M. E. (2017). Applying Best Practice Online Learning, Teaching, and Support to Intensive Online Environments: An Integrative Review. Frontiers in Education, 2. doi:10.3389/feduc.2017.00059

White, D., S., & Le Cornu, A. (2011). Visitors and Residents: A new typology for online engagement. First Monday, 16(9). doi:10.5210/fm.v16i9.3171

Dentistry is a hands-on profession. Dental, dental hygiene and therapy students will attest to the hours spent in laboratories, pre-clinical classes and dental clinics honing the psychomotor skills necessary to safely and effectively deliver care to their patients. In addition to exceptional psychomotor skills and a broad foundation of theoretical knowledge, interpersonal and reflective skills are also needed in the education of a skilled clinician. For centuries, the required learning activities have occurred in lecture theatres, seminar rooms and clinics with students and their teachers sharing the same physical space. The rapid disintegration of face-to-face teaching in early 2020 resulting from the CoVID-19 pandemic and associated social distancing mandates has been particularly jarring for a profession whose very essence lies within another’s personal space.

However, it has given those of us working in dental education the opportunity to reflect on how we might reframe dental education in the future by integrating the best that technology offers to support our students in acquiring the attributes necessary to become a competent clinical professional (Machado, Bonan, Perez, & Martelli, 2020).

Late last year, I was afforded the opportunity to lead a curriculum review of the two entry-to-practice degrees – the Bachelor of Oral Health (BOH) and the Doctor of Dental Surgery (DDS) – at the Melbourne Dental School. It has been over 10 years since the current curricula were designed and during that time, not only has technology advanced, but student expectations of their learning environment have also changed. Dental students are expecting that their time at dental school will include online learning, and they see this as helping them transition from a preclinical to a clinical environment (Inquimbert, Tramini, Romieu, & Giraudeau, 2019).

Much of the online learning the Melbourne Dental School students experience was adopted in acute response to the pandemic during 2020, and was not preceded with thoughtful decision-making. To maintain the continuity of dental education, educators scrambled to transition their teaching and learning activities from the traditional physical learning environment to the generally poorly understood, and to many mysterious, virtual environment. As I have been exploring the literature around curriculum, online learning and educational design research, I have been trying to determine how I can piece all these together.

From a pedagogical perspective, as a school we know what direction we should be moving in.  We need to reframe how we engage in theoretical dental education to leverage the best from both online and face-to-face class time with a blended learning approach; active collaborative learning, authentic problem solving and opportunities for self-reflection.

The process of designing a new curriculum to meet accreditation standards of a health professions degree, whilst transitioning from a traditional face-to-face, lecture based approach to a blended, collaborative approach is a complex problem (or series of complex problems…) that requires practical solutions. When I first read about the Education Design Research framework (S. McKenney & Reeves, 2020) it seemed appropriate for smaller education design research questions…but to borrow from Kylie Minogue, I can’t get it out of my head.

via GIPHY

Education design research involves the development of solutions to practical and complex problems. The theoretical knowledge developed during this iterative process can then inform the work of others (S. McKenney & Reeves, 2020). The three main phases of the model for conducting educational design research (analysis, design and evaluation) were based on models for instructional design and curriculum development (S. E. McKenney & Reeves, 2019).

The following video has a description of educational design research.

It therefore aligns with the model of curriculum design that I am employing (figure below) (Thomas, Kern, Hughes, & Chen, 2016). The ‘General Needs Assessment’ and ‘Learner Needs Assessment’ steps are ‘Analysis’, ‘Goals and Objectives’ and ‘Educational Strategies’ are ‘Design’ and the ‘Implementation’ and ‘Evaluation’ steps form the ‘Evaluation’ phase of the model for conducting design research in education (above).

However I have questions I need to answer before moving forward. Do I apply an education design research approach to designing a whole 3 (BOH) or 4-year (DDS) curriculum? Or should I be approaching this as multiple smaller research projects? Or should I be doing both? It would seem from the literature that the different steps in the curriculum design process could serve as individual education design research projects, but that they are likely to overlap (Kopcha, Schmidt, & McKenney, 2015). So with my head spinning with questions, possibilities and a little bit of fear I will end with Kylie again…

via GIPHY

(Obviously a gif of Kylie’s ‘Spinning Around’ as opposed to just Kylie spinning around was what I was after here…however I could not find one. Also, I doubt it would be considered appropriate to have that much skin on display on a reflective blog on higher education!)

References

Inquimbert, C., Tramini, P., Romieu, O., & Giraudeau, N. (2019). Pedagogical Evaluation of Digital Technology to Enhance Dental Student Learning. Eur J Dent, 13(1), 53-57. doi:10.1055/s-0039-1688526

Kopcha, T. J., Schmidt, M. M., & McKenney, S. (2015). Editorial 31(5): Special issue on educational design research (EDR) in post-secondary learning environments. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 31(5), i-ix. doi:10.14742/ajet.2903

Machado, R. A., Bonan, P. R. F., Perez, D., & Martelli, J. H. (2020). COVID-19 pandemic and the impact on dental education: discussing current and future perspectives. Braz Oral Res, 34, e083. doi:10.1590/1807-3107bor-2020.vol34.0083

McKenney, S., & Reeves, T. C. (2020). Educational design research: Portraying, conducting, and enhancing productive scholarship. Med Educ, 55(1), 82-92. doi:10.1111/medu.14280

McKenney, S. E., & Reeves, T. C. (2019). Conducting educational design research (Second edition. ed.): Routledge.

Thomas, P. A., Kern, D. E., Hughes, M. T., & Chen, B. Y. (2016). Curriculum development for medical education : a six-step approach (Third edition. ed.): Johns Hopkins University Press.

For something that brings a solid evidence-base to help inform the design of learning materials for students, I am surprised it has taken me a good 14 – 15 years to get a handle on understanding what cognitive load theory is, and how I might be able to use it to improve student learning. However perhaps through my combined experience of both teaching in higher education and presenting research has enabled me to build an understanding of this theory without knowing it was a theory!

This became evident over the last week as I prepared two different presentations. Early last week I needed to prepare a presentation to share my experience at ‘The Flipped Classroom in MDHS: Recent Experiences and Directions’, a Faculty of Medicine Dentistry and Health Sciences Learning & Teaching event. Towards the end of that week, I started working on a presentation for the EDUC90970 Facilitating Online Learning subject on Cognitive Load Theory.

In the ‘Flipped Classroom’ presentation I needed to share with my audience the basic premise of this model, results from a pilot study I carried out in 2020 as well as tips and insights from my experience. All in a 7-minute pre-recorded video. To do this, I started by eliminating any information that was not essential to telling the story. I employed simple transitions in PowerPoint to help highlight the important material, I told much of the story by narrating to images, with no onscreen text, presenting the speech and graphics simultaneously. Simple definitions were added to the start of the presentation and I tried to limit the use of on-screen text, presenting information in spoken form instead. When student quotes were used, I left these onscreen for viewers to read without any accompanying speech. These are strategies I have developed over years of experience in presenting information to both students and colleagues as well as sitting in many presentations as a student or researcher.

I then got working on the cognitive load theory presentation. Cognitive load theory is based on two basic concepts. Firstly, that as humans we have a limited working memory load, but an unlimited long-term memory (Kirschner, 2002). This is laid out in this simple video:

Secondly, our working memory load is affected by three different types of load related to the intrinsic nature of the task (intrinsic load), the way in which tasks are presented (extraneous load), and the amount of cognitive resources needed to transfer knowledge into our long-term memory (germane load) (van Merriënboer Jeroen & Ayres, 2005). These different loads are explained well in this video:

Cognitive load theory has been adapted to online learning with the cognitive theory of multimedia learning which incorporates the principle that we have two separate channels for processing auditory/ verbal information and visual/pictorial information (Mayer, 2019).

While reading about cognitive load theory, I came across a narrative review of research on online learning by Richard Mayer (Mayer, 2019). This paper largely discusses the research findings regarding instructional methods that can be employed to reduce extraneous cognitive load when designing learning activities for an online space. I was interested (and relieved!) to find that many of these methods I have stumbled across through many years of trial and error, and had recently employed in the presentation I had finished only days before.

Reflecting on my experience exploring cognitive load theory, and the cognitive theory of multimedia learning over the last week, I feel that I will now be far more purposeful in my design of online learning materials and activities, confident that I will be making choices based in cognitive science rather than just hunch.

Kirschner, P. A. (2002). Cognitive load theory: implications of cognitive load theory on the design of learning(1), 1. Retrieved from https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=sso&db=edsbl&AN=RN105151718&site=eds-live&scope=site&custid=s2775460

Mayer, R. E. (2019). Thirty Years of Research on Online Learning. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 33(2), 152-159. Retrieved from https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=sso&db=eric&AN=EJ1262953&site=eds-live&scope=site&custid=s2775460

http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/acp.3482

van Merriënboer Jeroen, J. G., & Ayres, P. (2005). Research on Cognitive Load Theory and Its Design Implications for E-Learning. Educational Technology Research and Development, 53(3), 5-13. Retrieved from https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=sso&db=edsjsr&AN=edsjsr.30220437&site=eds-live&scope=site&custid=s2775460

One of the challenges I face in building my knowledge in the field of education is the myriad learning theories and trying to understand how they might inform Dental Education, which is the field in which I teach. How they fit with other learning theories, and how they might help guide the development or learning activities, subjects or an entire course.

A little over a week ago, I read Dave Cormier’s piece on rhizomatic education (Cormier, 2008) and have been thinking about it since. Cormier describes rhizomatic education as a model of learning where “curriculum is not driven by predefined inputs from experts; it is constructed and negotiated in real time by the contributors of those negotiated via the learning process” (Cormier, 2008. p.3).

Upon the first reading, I dismissed the theory of rhizomatic education as not being relevant to dental education. This was based on the nature of rhizomatic learning being that knowledge is constructed by the community of learners, and that “external validation of knowledge, either by an expert or by a constructed curriculum” (Cormier, 2008. p. 4) is not necessary; indeed, it is integral to the definition of this theory.

This idea opposes what we try to instill in our students in regard to practicing evidence-based dentistry (Afrashtehfar & Assery, 2017). As health care professionals, the clinical decision making of our students should be firmly grounded in research which largely makes up the canon of our profession. My main concern with rhizomatic education was that unless our students had developed the foundational knowledge of clinical dentistry, left to construct their own curriculum they risked following a path to misinformation.

But, I have read enough education literature to consider that perhaps I just didn’t understand. As a scientist, education literature can seem like another language. Rather than letting it go, I was determined to challenge myself, and went searching. I stumbled across a storytelling artifact explaining rhizomatic learning, an accompaniment to a paper by Alexios Brailas describing a practical implementation of this theory (Brailas, 2020b). In this artifact, (Brailas, 2020a) the author employed a comic-book format to summarise the main points of the his paper.

At the same time, I have been reading about clinical humanities experiences in dental education to promote observation, reflection and critical thinking skills (Zahra, 2018). Students explore the subjectivity of the Arts through topics such as inequalities in access to care, perspectives on experience of illness and aesthetic ambiguity (Zahra, 2018). As part of these activities, students are encouraged to share their reflections through video or as written reflection as part of an e-portfolio. Through engaging with these activities, the learning of the students is not based on established canon, but on their own experience and reflection. With their peers, they are working collaboratively to build knowledge which is not, and does not need to be validated by an expert. An example of rhizomatic education.

Which led me back to a second reading of Cormier (2008), where I could now see the clarification that rhizomatic education may be a good model for some disciplines where an established body of knowledge does not exist – such as clinical humanities.

References

Afrashtehfar, K. I., & Assery, M. K. (2017). From dental science to clinical practice: Knowledge translation and evidence-based dentistry principles. Saudi Dent J, 29(3), 83-92. doi:10.1016/j.sdentj.2017.02.002

Brailas, A. (2020a). Rhizomatic Learning Explained. Retrieved from https://edarxiv.org/n4xhs/

Brailas, A. (2020b). Rhizomatic Learning in Action: A Virtual Exposition for Demonstrating Learning Rhizomes. Paper presented at the Eighth International Conference on Technological Ecosystems for Enhancing Multiculturality, Salamanca, Spain. https://doi.org/10.1145/3434780.3436565

Cormier, D. (2008). Rhizomatic Education: Community as Curriculum. Innovate: Journal of Online Education, 4(5). Retrieved from https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=sso&db=eric&AN=EJ840362&site=eds-live&scope=site&custid=s2775460

Zahra, F. S. (2018). Clinical Humanities; informal, transformative learning opportunities, where knowledge gained from Humanities epistemologies is translated back into clinical practice, supporting the development of professional autonomy in undergraduate dental students [Version 2]. MedEdPublish, 7(3). Retrieved from https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=sso&db=edsdoj&AN=edsdoj.4b8eb144cf3547168d3f08526e2ac360&site=eds-live&scope=site&custid=s2775460

I feel my digital Visitor & Residents map in my bones! For the last year I have lived my life at work, in various digital space. Please don’t think the empty space in the ‘Personal’ half of the map is filled with digital-free escapades in nature. The truth is that empty space currently does not exist.

Creating the map has got me thinking about how it has changed over time. Up until March 2020, the mere suggestion of a Zoom meeting with a colleague oversees would have me in a complete dither and booking IT support. I had never heard of Screencast-o-matic, and Canvas was shiny and new…and confusing. A year on, and I navigate these with ease, and regularly support my colleagues to use these digital tools.

The concept of ‘Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants’ has seemed very real to me. I have been known to get my 12-yr old out of bed to help me get Netflix to work. (And I STILL need him to connect the car to Spotify…or connect Spotify to the car…whichever.) He could do all these things because he had grown up with them. I was too old to learn these new tricks.

However, reflecting on how my ability to wield digital tools has changed over the last 12 months, it is clear that just as David White and Alison Le Cornu (1) proposed, it is motivation and context rather than age or background that matters.

I still can’t figure out how to switch from one digital streaming service to another because I haven’t had the opportunity to spend any time learning how. However, I can record a video, edit out the fumbled words, add captions and upload it for my students to watch. And this is because I had the motivation (extrinsic mind you…) and context to spend the time with the digital tool.

(1) White, D. S., & Le Cornu, A. (2011). Visitors and Residents: A new typology for online engagement. First Monday, 16(9). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v16i9.3171

Really looking forward to the Facilitating Online Learning subject – after a fairly frantic 12 months, it feels indulgent to carve out some time for reading and thinking about learning & teaching.

My name is Samantha Byrne, a senior lecturer at the Melbourne Dental School (MDS). At the school, I hold the role of Divisional lead: Dental Education & Innovation.

You can also find me on Twitter @_Tooth_Fairy__

and Instagram @_the_tooth_fairy_

I teach oral microbiology to Bachelor of Oral Health and Doctor of Dental Surgery students at the MDS.

In my spare time I love to knit, sew and crochet. During 2020 I designed and crocheted a collection of oral bacteria, to scale where 10 cm represents 1 um.